Upon developing a speech synthesis English dictionary or creating English phonetic text, an English pronunciation symbol string must be input. However, English pronunciation symbols cannot be intuitively input unlike Japanese reading.
As conventional methods of inputting English pronunciation symbols (about 40 symbols), a method of registering pronunciation symbols as external characters and selecting them from an external character symbol table, a method of setting each of pronunciation symbols in correspondence with one or two alphabets and inputting symbols like normal text, and the like are known (for example, see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-78133).
However, with the method of registering pronunciation symbols as external characters, the user must display the external character symbol table and select a symbol from it every time he or she inputs one pronunciation symbol, resulting in an inefficient input process. Also, since external characters are used, compatibility with other systems is poor.
Furthermore, with the method of setting each pronunciation symbol in correspondence with one or two alphabets, it is difficult for the user to intuitively recognize the correspondence between an alphabet string and pronunciation symbol and to accurately input symbols.